kdubken's Blog

     President Obama promised change and hope. He promised hope and change. He certainly lived up to that promise in the last weeks of the campaign. I hoped President Obama would change and apparently he did a 180 degree change in campaign promises during the last  couple of months.

      Every other word out of his mouth is tax cut and of course none for the wealthy. The Democratics' term "wealthy" is used to describe prosperity of a person according to a convoluted scale of relativity between the government's need versus  the individuals.

       A year ago President Obama said all is lost in Iraq pull out immediately .  In the last couple months Obama changed to be in favor of the surge and pull out according to conditions on the ground.

        I'm confident President Obama has the ability to change like a chameleon ,but, the following people are still in charge of how he changes.

        I'm now wondering what "change" NBC and CBS have in mind for Him.

         I wonder what "change" Sen.Reid and Rep. Pelossi have for Him.

        What "change" do Schumer, Dodd, Franks,and, Kennedy have in store for Him.

         The same people who brought down the banking Industry are still in charge. The Reid, Pelossi combo. plus Schumer ,Dodd plus  Clinton , Franks.  Still regulate the banks and are in charge of oversight in banking. 

           These people were in charge of President Bush ,and will be in charge of  President Obama it Seems.

In a recent blog comment, I read that ;" No one twisted the arms of banks to make bad loans." This is not true. Each refusal of a bad credit housing loan was a civil rights suit waiting to happen. Accusations of red lining , prejudice, ,and, sympathetic jury's made these suits almost impossible for banks to win. I am not sure how long a bank is required to hold a loan. That 3 month statement is a guess. It is probably more than that.

 My friends at my bank tell me that they dumped real estate loans way before the prices started down in order to keep their operating capital high. They were just making to many of them. My bank is kinda conservative. They pretty much want you to pay a loan off before they give it to you.

What do mean no one twisted arms? That is exactly how it was done. Banks all across this nation were given the choice: Make loans to unqualified buyers or hire lawyers.The banks who made the loans were required by law to hold them for a period of time. 3 months I think.
Individual banks gave real money for the purchase of real property. As long as the value of the property kept going up mortgage banks bought them. The bank who originated the loan knew the were high risk loans so they bundled their real estate debt and sold out every 3 months. Mortgage companies bought them ,and sold them for profit.
When real estate price went down the only buyer was government created Fanny Mae Mac CSI's. These banks operated what amounted to a 3 month float supported by real value provided by the original lender. THEY TRADED PAPER FOR PAPER The float lasted about about a year and they went belly up.
Defaults of bad debt pulled Hugh chunks of capital out of the economy.
That my friend is where we stand today.
The horror in our situation is Barak Husein Obama.
His solution is to raise tax on capital providers (the greedy rich),and further reduce available capital.
A MAIN REASON SOCIALISM CAN NOT WORK

            As it turns out,  the clothes all the fuss is about  is borrowed. It belongs to the RNC. Sara Palin wears an outfit  3 times and gives them back to the RNC for charity. Sara's own shopping tends to be more low end re-sale shops and Target. This is just another non scandal by the Obama press.

           The story about her clothes did it's job though. It filled acres of media space just when people were starting to learn a little bit about Obama's economic policies. It allowed Obama to explain nothing for a few more days.

           Those of us who have enjoyed the Bush tax cuts  have begun to realise that when President Bush leaves office his tax cuts expire. His tax cuts go with him. At that point everyone's tax goes up and those who were exempted from paying any income tax go back to paying them. We then wait for congress to cut taxes.  A Democrat congress is going to cut taxes? Get real.

             Obama says it is the governments job to "spread the wealth around."

             Spread the wealth  more eloquently stated is;" From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.'  (Quote from Carl Marx)

By STANLEY KURTZ

WHAT exactly does a "community organizer" do? Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.

In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

THE seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Commu nity Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions.

Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets.

Fannie and Freddie acted in response to Clinton administration pressure to boost homeownership rates among minorities and the poor. However compassionate the motive, the result of this systematic disregard for normal credit standards has been financial disaster.

ONE key pioneer of ACORN's subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott - an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae's mortgage policies.

Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in "direct action" - organizers' term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a "living wage" law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.

In February 1990, Illinois regulators held what was believed to be the first-ever state hearing to consider blocking a thrift merger for lack of compliance with CRA. The challenge was filed by ACORN, led by Talbott. Officials of Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association, her target, complained that ACORN pressure was undermining its ability to meet strict financial requirements it was obligated to uphold and protested being boxed into an "affirmative-action lending policy." The following years saw Talbott featured in dozens of news stories about pressuring banks into higher-risk minority loans.

IN April 1992, Talbott filed an other precedent-setting com plaint using the "community support requirements" of the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout, this time against Avondale Federal Bank for Savings. Within a month, Chicago ACORN had organized its first "bank fair" at Malcolm X College and found 16 Chicago-area financial institutions willing to participate.

Two months later, aided by ACORN organizer Sandra Maxwell, Talbott announced plans to conduct demonstrations in the lobbies of area banks that refused to attend an ACORN-sponsored national bank "summit" in New York. She insisted that banks show a commitment to minority lending by lowering their standards on downpayments and underwriting - for example, by overlooking bad credit histories.

By September 1992, The Chicago Tribune was describing Talbott's program as "affirma- tive-action lending" and ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards that it had won on behalf of minorities.

And Talbott continued her effort to, as she put it, drag banks "kicking and screaming" into high-risk loans. A September 1993 story in The Chicago Sun-Times presents her as the leader of an initiative in which five area financial institutions (including two of her former targets, now plainly cowed - Bell Federal Savings and Avondale Federal Savings) were "participating in a $55 million national pilot program with affordable-housing group ACORN to make mortgages for low- and moderate-income people with troubled credit histories."

What made this program different from others, the paper added, was the participation of Fannie Mae - which had agreed to buy up the loans. "If this pilot program works," crowed Talbott, "it will send a message to the lending community that it's OK to make these kind of loans."

Well, the pilot program "worked," and Fannie Mae's message that risky loans to minorities were "OK" was sent. The rest is financial-meltdown history.

IT would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee's report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama's organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott's ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report ac knowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship."

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN's Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts.

And, as the leader of another charity, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama channeled more funding Talbott's way - ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN's overall efforts.

In return, Talbott proudly announced her support of Obama's first campaign for state Senate, saying, "We accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer."

IN short, to understand the roots of the subprime-mort gage crisis, look to ACORN's Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.

Then you'll truly know what community organizers do.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

           John McCain is the 5th man out  of the Keating Five. He met with them and rejected their scheme.  Sen. McCain was the only  one of the Keating Five to be exonerated by the Democrat senate investigating committee.

        1/2 The martgage market 6 trillion dollars worth held by Freddy Mac has passed to the federal debt by act of congress when they took Freddy Mac out of private sector and put it into FHA.. Is Freddy Mac still buying bad credit? Congress voted no pay-go funds to cover to cover the loss because they don't know how much it will be.

            Here is some more debt to worry about

But even this staggering cost—and the $140 billion already spent to bail out AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—pales in comparison to the massive bill taxpayers will face for runaway spending on entitlement programs.

A new Heritage Foundation graphic sent to news media demonstrates that this $840 billion is just a drop in the bucket compared to the long-term liabilities from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

        The inexperienced,  moose hunting, hockey mom, from Alaska will have her hands full tomorrow night when she debates the 2 of the  most  articulate members in the Obama campaign:  Gwen Eiffel,and, Joe Biden.

        Joe Biden is an experienced presidential debater who can ferret out and attack his opponent's weaknesses. To be fair, however, is subject to misstatement..

         Sen. Biden is lucky to  have Gwen Eiffel (National Press Foundation Award winner) as moderator  to assist him in the debate.

         Gov. Palin will be out there all alone pitted against  2  Washington insiders ready to tear her apart.    

         Will it be a feeding frenzy by the 2 sharks?

         Will it be a turkey shoot by the gun toting, lipsticked, Pit Bull?

        Tomorrow night's debate could very well pave the road to the White House for one of the participants.

              A big question asked by the Democrats concerns Sarah Palins qualifications to take over as president in the event McCain could not perform his duties. It seems to be a consensus that a structured debate is not one of McCain"s strong suits. Maybe McCain could  send Sara as a surrogate to debate Obama. It couldn't hurt McCain sense the media has decided the winner in advance of the event. Only the American people would win because a debate between those two would highlight whom is less experienced.

              On second thought; Obama wouldn't show up for FEAR of  barracuda .

            When Gibson asked Sarah to explain the "Bush Doctrine" it would have helped had he known what the" Bush Doctrine" is. In his arrogance, Gibson  thought Sara should read his biased mind and know that he was referring to preemptive strike. Charley thinks that a policy statement designed to encourage Omar Kadafi to surrender his nuclear program is the Bush Doctrine. The Bush administration backed away from that policy statement after it had served it's purpose. If preemptive strike were still Bush policy the Democratics would be calling for a deadline to get troops out of Iran by now. Sarah Palin is being criticised for trying to explain the present "Bush  Doctrine" to Charley without calling attention to his ignorance.  It is curious to me how knowledge is punished and ignorance rewarded in the media.  Is it possible the left leaning, empty, talking  heads might actually believe their own propaganda?

           Will Joe Biden withdraw from the Vice President slot in favor of Hillery Clinton? Now that he has admitted that  Hillery Clinton  was a better pick for VP than he, himself,  his help  will be greatly diminished.  Maybe it is too late maybe not.

          The Chicago machine has won control over the Democratic Party.   The New York (Clinton controlled) leadership will be replaced by Obama people. Will Hillery fall in line and pull Obamas' fat out of the fire or will she start a  campaign to get her party back?

          How big is the split in the Democratic Party?

   "{ Republicans can continue these cynical attacks,but we won't let them dicredit the idea that ordinary people can and should have a stake in their communities.

    We know that people who serve their communities--from those who fight for steady jobs and improved houseing in their neighborhoods, to those who work in soup kitchens and halfway houses, to the young people takeing time after class to register voters, to the volenteers who work  for better schools and cleaner streets--are a vital part of this country.They're not just fighting to make their communities better,they're fighting to make America better.

     If you believe in the power of ordinary people to do extraordinary things--if you refuse to stand by and watch these cynical Republicans attacks on grassroots service--please and help to register voters in your community.

     This is how real change has always come about in America, and this is how we'll bring change to America come November.}"--------------------------------------------
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---------------------------------------These words appear in a blog by 1926miss from REC                      

          She takes no comments, so, I'm commenting on my own blog and inviteing comments.  In the first place, Republicans have made no, not any , none, cynical attacks on anyone. Just another Democratics LIE. Republicans have attacked no, not any, none of the good people working to improve communities throughout  this great land.

        THE FACT IS---A majority of the successful people in this great work are Republicans.

         This is how real change comes to America and is how John McCain/Sarah Palin will bring  real change successfully ------key word here( successfully) 

      Chicago community improvement programs are corruptions run by the Daily democratic machine.  There were more people killed in Chicago last year than Iraq.

        In a TV interview today Barak Oboma said the Republicans spent their convention time saying bad things about him and no time on issues. He described republican comments as negitive. He said the Republicans have no agenda and they called him names. Poor baby doesn't he know that what goes around comes around? I thing he learned a lesson from all this.  The lesson is: when you slap a woman -- make sure she isn't a hocky mom.  When youre on the wrong side of an issue  the opposition will point it out. 

  Denver  (AP)   reports 2 Obama supporters traveled from Rolla Mo.with their banner "Rednecks for Obama". The closest thing to a  (Redneck) the Obama campaign could come up with is a RETIERD STATE TROPPER and friend : Tony Veissman and Les Spencer. Veissman and Spencer addressed the "GUN" issue. "Veissman said he doesn't share his fellow rednecks' fear that Obama will try to take away their guns. We've had many Democratic presidents and we still have our guns." 

         As a card carrying REDNECK  I asked 5 of my redneck friends what they thought of  Obama and the  state troopers' remarks. Here are their answers:  Bob--*$@#% Bill--*%#^&*%    Ed*%*$^&    Sam---@$%^*Mike$^&*%^^

         Is nothing sacred to these people? Obama is exactly the kind of big city machine politition freedom loveing rednecks have allways voted against.

           Say one thing and do another is the prime Democratic's tactic.

        Sounds like a good idea to me.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzQ5OTgzZWRkMT
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